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Another easily-visited race in northern France was the Circuit of the Port of Dunkirk. For some years this had a strong British entry, largely through the agency of Roger St Pierre who is at the time of writing a contributor to
Cycling Plus
magazine. As the title suggests the course for this event lay entirely on closed roads withinthe dock area of Dunkirk. In 1975 I went with the job of doing a story on the race for
International Cycle Sport
, travelling by ferry from Dover which deposited uswithin walking distance of the course. As it happened there was an ample dose of rain sweeping in intermittently off the Channel making an already tricky circuit evenmore exciting as there were numerous railway crossings, the rails greasier than ever under the downpour.
My rst picture shows the part of the main group negotiating just such a hazard with one rider already having come to grief in the centre of the shot. The rider in the
left foreground is Keith Mernickle, having a rare outing in a road event, his cyclo-cross experience doubtless standing him in good stead in such conditions.
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Also competing was former world pursuit championHugh Porter, here shown approaching a tricky corner with some caution. By this time in his career he had business interests – in fact he is riding a machine bearing his own brand name – and subsequently wenton to a career as a race commentator. It is interestingto note in the light of present-day pampering of sports people that, like Reg Harris, Hugh was a self-madechampion. Note the straw bales beyond him, placed strategicallyto protect any rider misjudging the slippery corner.
The second photo is of Belgian star Patrick
Sercu, the eventual winner, here leadingBritish professional Nigel Dean, who also hadsomething of a background in journalism.
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Like most Belgians Patrick Sercu wasvery much an all-round rider and this picture shows him in action indoorsin the Ghent Six-day event in the mid-Seventies. His sprinting power, both onroad and track, was legendary and hewas in the winning pairing of this eventeleven times between 1965 and 1981.As far as technical matters go,
employment of electronic ash as the
main light on an SLR camera with focal- plane shutter dictated the use a relativelyslow shutter speed and although the
speed of the ash has stopped Sercu, the
rider in the background, lit mainly bythe stadium lighting, has appeared as an
almost transparent double image. The
series I took at Ghent was somethingof a tryout as I was using 35mm colour
transparency lm to test the results of ash as the main light.
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John Coulson: A Bit of an All-Rounder: 40 years of cycling photography
For 40 years John Coulson combined his love of cycling with a profound interest in photography. As a club cyclist his racing achievements were somewhat ordinary (he did once finish 5th in the Wessex 24-hour time trial); as a photographer, however, they were exceptional.
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